After the tragedy of July 2019, Kyoto Animation decided last November to indefinitely postpone any future installments of the Kyoto Animation Awards until further notice. Apparently, there were talks within the company to reinstate the awards this year, but in an update posted to their official website on Thursday, August 13th, the company revealed that they have decided to continue the postponement into the foreseeable future.
In the blog post, they stated emphatically that the company would not be accepting any submissions for the awards this year. It was further stated that they will discard any submissions sent to them without even being opened.
The Kyoto Animation Awards are a mostly annual contest to find new works to publish and potentially adapt into anime, with a cash prize being given out to the authors of the submissions that were chosen. While there has ever only been one grand prize winner (Violet Evergarden in 2014), there have been many runner-ups that have gone on to see great success in both print and anime formats including Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions, Free!, Beyond the Boundary, and Myriad Colors Phantom World.
So real talk: I remember there was once a time when I made fun of the Kyoto Animation Awards specifically because they would never award a grand prize, which I thought was a silly way to run a contest. Over the last decade, I’ve softened a bit towards the awards as I realized that it wasn’t that Kyoto Animation was being stubborn, they just had incredibly high standards. In fact, it’s specifically because of those incredibly high standards that we got the amazing Violet Evergarden anime in 2018.
Here’s to hoping that Kyoto Animation can recover enough to start issuing awards to deserving authors again at some point in the next couple of years!
Source: Official Website via ITMedia
